Soft Skull News

The editor of That's Revolting: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, Mattilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore has, notwithstanding his fibromyalgia, launched his blog, Nobody Passes, darling.

Mattilda's some beautiful things to say in there, especially a letter to Mattilda's dying father, but here's the most recent post, on Mr. Foley, in which you get a sense to the potent combination of the personal and the political that you'll find on this blog:

I thought I had discovered something that no one else knew about -- the tapping of feet underneath stall walls, notes written on toilet paper and wrapped around pens, the texture of hairs between pants-below-knees and everything above. This was my gay world of desire and loathing, the place I inhabited so many evenings after school -- it's where I learned about men like Mark Foley -- at the urinals, between stalls, in the stairwell, in their cars in the parking lot.

I remember this one guy who drove me to my father's office -- it was just one block away, but he really wanted to drive me. He handed me his business card -- Capitol Hill, lobbyist. I wondered about his audacity -- did he know I was 15? I hoped that I was passing as older. I wondered what would happen if I called him, but that was his desire not mine. I wanted so much more.

Here is what I would've wanted that lobbyist -- or Mark Foley -- to say to me, if I'd run into him at Woodie’s department store or Mazza Gallery or Georgetown Park: This is a monstrous world we live in, but your defiant faggotry will take you to places as brilliant as you can imagine -- if you need somewhere to go to talk about your dreams, your hopes and hopelessness, don't hesitate to call -- I will require nothing of you.

Unfortunately, Mark Foley will probably never utter these words, and that is the real tragedy.